I’ve had a busy weekend, most of the busyness being done on Saturday when I made a day trip to Pennsylvania (or as the locals there call it, Pennsavania). It was basically intended as a visit to family I have in Lancaster (pronounced LAN-cas-ter, not Lan-CAS-ter), but it had some photographic components added to it, too.

My first stop was in Langhorne, PA, north of Philadelphia, where I paid a visit to my friend Stephen Perloff, the editor of the non-profit photo publication, the Photo Review. On the way there, I got lost, missing a right turn after I got off the highway and ending up back on the highway, but I managed to figure out where I had to go.

I normally donate a couple of my prints to the Photo Review’s annual benefit auction in Philadelphia (on November 6 this year; more on that later), so I stopped by to give Stephen my two prints. One of those prints will not be auctioned off in Philadelphia this year, as I was told that someone down in the great state of Texas already bought it in the pre-auction sale – for $500! (More on that in an upcoming post, too.)

From there I made it to my family in Lancaster without incident, and I enjoyed my visit. My next stop was to pay a visit to the photographer Bill Earle, who lives about an hour’s drive east of Lancaster. After a big traffic backup due to a broken down car on the road, my trip to Bill went smoothly – until I got lost again by getting off the highway an exit too soon! Riding around and around, I ended up on the main street of the local town, not really knowing where I was going. When I saw a parking lot I could pull into, I did so and gave Bill a call. Fortunately, I was right by a major intersection, and Bill gave me directions to get to his place, which I was able to do, despite it getting dark, making the street signs very hard to read.

Anyway, I had never met Bill before, and he turned out to be a fine host. After going out to dinner at a nice local restaurant, we returned to Bill’s house where he showed me some of his prints (including lith prints) and he looked through a box of my own prints that I’d brought with me. Afterwards, I ended up trading one of my prints for one of his, which I’m glad to have in my collection.

Overall, it was a nice visit, and a rare chance for me to talk with someone else seriously about photography and darkroom printing – something I rarely get to do here at home in New York.

The adventure continued, though, on the way back home, when I got lost yet another time! As it was about 10:45 pm when I left to return home, it was too dark for me to glance at my hand drawn map to check where I should be going. (I always draw up an easy to read map when driving in an unfamiliar area and I have nobody with me to read directions to me.)

This time, I missed the exit that would have lead me to the Pennsylvania Turnpike, probably because I had gotten the route numbers confused, and was really thoroughly lost, driving around in the dark wondering where the hell I was going. I did finally get to the turnpike, but not before stopping to ask for directions not once but twice, and did continue on to New Jersey and then New York. (As I told someone today, I was never before so happy to see New Jersey!)

In the end, I got home around 1:30 a.m., having driven a total of 350 miles, but I came away with an even greater realization: I really need to get a GPS.

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In other news, I’ve spent some time lately writing about and writing to models. I got an e-mail recently with the subject line “nude girls !” that I, at first, thought was a spam message. It wasn’t. Instead, it was from a well known photographer of the nude who I’ve known for a number of years. He wrote to say that he’ll be coming to New York and asked that I suggest some models that he might want to photograph.

One of those models I suggested is the gorgeous Julie Maximova, who I photographed in February of last year. I also want to work with her again, so this was an opportune time for me to write to her. I also decided to scan a few more photos of her from our photo session. You can see one of them at the top here. (As I said, she is gorgeous.)